


A Long Way From Home

by TiredFictionGate



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Miraculous Ladybug, 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia
Genre: Angst, Damian Wayne As Todoroki Shoto, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, I Tried, I swear, Jon is hard to write so I copped out on his scene and gave it to his mom, Lore - Freeform, M/M, MAX CHAOS, Mentions of other characters - Freeform, More magic than just Miraculous Magic, Multi, Reincarnated Characters, She was just the last straw, Suicidal Thoughts, There's going to be a lot of drama, all the deaths were necessary, except familial love, i can't write psychological damage/recovery as well as I wish, if i know my writing style, not sure if it's violent enough to warrent the warning, poly ships, tags and ships may be subject to change, there's nothing between them, there's probably going to be crack at some point, unhealthy relationships? maybe, world building
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-17 11:29:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28848339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TiredFictionGate/pseuds/TiredFictionGate
Summary: Late holiday gift exchange for chick_fil_bae. I've rated it Teen, someone tell me if it needs to be moved to Mature.
Relationships: Batfamily Members & Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Jonathan Kent/Damian Wayne, Luka Couffaine/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug/Damian Wayne, Tim Drake/Kon-El | Conner Kent
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	A Long Way From Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chick_fil_bae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chick_fil_bae/gifts).



> Congrats, you have a Maribat x BnHA fic.
> 
> There was a moment I was terrified this fic was going to spoil something for you given where you were in the series when this started but I think that ship has sailed by now and you're probably further than I am.
> 
> I had two ideas for the way this was going to go, baseline chaos/maximum angst and maximum chaos. Maximum chaos won but I might make an outline and headcanons for baseline chaos. I would like to say that the Prologue is my first attempt at genuine angst writing without crack.
> 
> I should have gone with the pining MariDamiJon fic I was originally going to write.

Marinette had considered that they wouldn’t survive the final battle against Hawkmoth and Mayura, but she hadn’t considered that she might be the only survivor out of the four miraculous users.

Mayura, Natalie Sancour, had died from using a broken Miraculous. Dusuu was then passed down to Lila Rossi. The suspicious timing and Rossi’s careless showing off of the peacock miraculous had clued the heroes into the identities of their villains.

Ladybug and Chat Noir had raided the Agreste Manor. They found the corpse of Emilie Agreste, Phaisaine - Lila’s newest alter ego - and Hawkmoth. In the final battle, Ladybug had been knocked out midway. When she came to, Chat Noir had just used Cataclysm on Hawkmoth and was dying of blood loss.

She learned Chat was Adrian Agreste. Her crush and her best friend were one and the same.

And yet, she couldn’t save him.

The miraculous cure won’t - can’t bring back those who have died while using a miraculous, even more so when it’s the black cat miraculous.

Six years, hundreds of Akuma, thousands of resurrected deaths, millions of traumatised victims. They’d finally won against Hawkmoth. But it didn’t feel like she’d won.

A pyrrhic victory.

Sometimes she wondered why she'd kept fighting.

She had had to put off her dreams of being a designer to stay as Ladybug. Her former classmates and friends had long since abandoned her for Rossi at that point and after they’d all gone off to college, it was like it’d never mattered in the first place. And her parents… they’d died in a robbery gone wrong, the bakery had gone up in flames and she lost her childhood home.

She couldn’t help but resent Fu and Tikki and the whole world, really. Just a little, as she moved into her former master’s old massage parlour.

Fu for leaving her alone with all the responsibilities she never wanted, all the pressure of being a hero on top of everything else she had going on

And Tikki for all the misfortunes she’d encountered since becoming Ladybug, because apparently, there was a balance that had to be kept. And everytime Ladybug used Lucky Charm, the good fortune used for the spell had to be countered with the flood of misfortune she was facing now.

Really, it felt like all the world was against her and even those she called allies couldn’t be trusted.

Yet, she couldn’t bring herself to hate them.

The resentment smouldered but the guilt that came with it burned.

_How dare she think that of them?_

Fu had only been doing his best - she ignored the part of her that would counter with a hissed “Too little, too late.” - and Tikki couldn’t help the way her magic worked. The Kwami did what she could to alleviate the worst of the bad luck without completely disrupting the balance.

If it weren’t for Tikki and Luka, Marinette thinks she would have lost her mind a long time ago.

Luka… Luka… Poor Luka…

Marinette ran her hand through the sleeping man’s hair, tips still dyed blue curled around her fingers as she caressed the scar where his left ear used to be.

“Is something bothering, my melody?” Luka asked, apparently he hadn’t been as asleep as she had thought. He rolled over so he could face her, his worried blue eyes meeting her own.

Marinette’s breath caught. Guilt, desperation, and longing welling up in her chest and throat, making it uncomfortably tight as if choking her.

“I’m sorry.” she barely managed to whisper.

Luka lazily reached up and brushed a tear from her eye - she was crying?

“For what?”

For lying to you, for being so useless that you lost your ear, for being unable to save your mother, for forcing you to be here with me - for me - despite that. For not loving you like I should.

“I-” Marinette swallowed hard. “I can’t love you like you deserve.” she said instead.

Luka’s eyes softened. “Melody...”

His hand moved up to tangle with her hair and he gently guided her head down as he pushed himself up so their foreheads touched. His nose brushed against hers.

“I don’t mind, I’ll stay with you for as long as you’ll have me.”

“I feel like I’m taking advantage of you.” Marinette confessed miserably.

Luka smiled wryly. “If anything it’s the other way around. You need someone to help ground you and I’m here because I want to be that someone, so don’t you dare think that you’re tricking me into anything...”

“But I-” She absently brushed against his scar again.

“Not your fault.” He said, giving her hair a light tug, just enough to leave a stinging sensation against her scalp. “My mother’s death wasn’t your fault either. La Warlogia attacked there was nothing you could have done.”

La Warlogia, Paris’s new villainess. A warlock who had been curious about the miraculous and had decided the best way to find them was to drag them out like Hawkmoth had. But La Warlogia was worse than Hawkmoth had ever been. She left killed people, people who couldn’t be brought back by the miraculous cure because she hadn’t been using a miraculous.

Anarka had been one of those who had died and Luka had lost his ear trying to protect her and Julieka.

But because of that, “Ladybug” had been alerted early and she was able to capture La Warlogia before more could die. The problem afterwards was keeping her contained - unlike Hawkmoth, they couldn’t just remove a miraculous and it was done - and the bodies she left behind.

Luka tugged again. “Marinette?”

Marinette winced, the stinging sensation was enough deterrent to wipe those thoughts away for now. She decided to change the subject.

“If my plan succeeds…” Marinette closed her eyes, burying her head in the crook of his neck. “I don’t know what might happen.” She cursed herself, a lighter subject would have been a better choice.

Luka adjusts himself to accommodate the shift in weight. “We cross that bridge when we get to it.”

“We might die, you know?” Marinette murmured. “We might erase our very existence from living memory. Or worse, we might sink Europe like Atlantis or we could end up destroying the entire world.”

“You’re catastrophizing, Melody.” Luka cut in, there was an amused smile on his face.

“I just-”

“Everything will be just fine.”

“You don’t know that!” 

Marinette tried to pull away so she could pace, but Luka pulled the former superhero into his arms, holding her against his chest. “It’ll be okay, everything will be fine.” he repeated it, his hand combing through her hair to calm her.

The designer melted into his arms. “You don’t know that,” she protests weakly.

Her eyes landed on the miracle box where the miraculous jewels resided. The kwami had agreed to it when she’d brought it up. It would prevent them from ever being misused again but the backlash… they could only theorize what the price would be and none of them were particularly attractive.

Luka didn’t know about her being Ladybug, he didn’t know that they were dealing with kwami, gods and magic beyond the reasoning of mortals like himself, like she used to be before she became the Guardian. Even if he did, she wasn’t sure that he’d be able to comprehend the severity of what she was working with.

She sure didn’t.

All he knew was that she had to do something dangerous and he wasn’t going to let her do it alone, even if that’s what she wanted. He would stick by her but he wouldn’t pry despite being obviously curious and worried.

By the Kwami, she wanted to love him just for that. Her Luka, her poor Luka.

She closed her eyes and leaned closer, whispering her wishes to him before she brought their lips together - it was not the first time they’d kissed but tonight might be their last. His arms tightened around her and he pulled in her closer.

Tonight, just tonight, she would let herself pretend she was in love again.

-

The next day, the Guardian took the miraculous jewels and destroyed them with a magical ritual created with what she had learned from the books she had pillaged from La Warlogia.

The Guardian had known that the resulting magical backlash would be large, perhaps enough to kill her and take out a continent so she had tried to contain it into a limited area and sent the power upwards instead of outwards. Perhaps she would die but innocents wouldn’t.

There was a single, small mistake that she had made.

There was a rune that she used for the containment of power. That rune held power denoting that of space-time and instead of just space. So, instead of containing the backlash from the destruction of the miraculous to one location and sending the power upwards, the spell went through time and destroyed the very history miraculous right up to when the mage met the Kwami.

And so, time reset. History rewrote itself. The world moved on without the Kwami to guide the events and quite frankly, there wasn’t much that changed.

Except that former miraculous users who lived again - only the most compatible ones - were plagued with dreams and visions of another life as they were visited by old friends their souls could feel but themselves could not see. Those who were particularly well versed in magic were able to regain their memory of another timeline and visit the Kwami in the astral state. But that’s another story.

This time around, Paris was not besieged by a man with a magical brooch that allowed him to take over the minds of his fellow Parisians. They had plenty of new problems to replace it but a magical emotional terrorist was not one of them.

Our interests lie elsewhere, in a city called Gotham, America.

In the other timeline, the kwami had not left planet Earth to re-explore the universe as they were bound to their miraculous. Plagg hadn’t destroyed an entire planet formerly known as Krypton, Tikki did not become bored enough to accidentally grant humans superhuman abilities, and Trixx hadn’t tricked the Martians into believing something that ended with the massacre of the Green Martians, to name a few things. 

(What happened with the Green Lanterns Corps will remain forever unmentioned. Just know that Mullo’s anger was not sated for a long time and it was terrifying.) 

… ok. _fine._ So the butterfly effect just takes longer than humans like to believe and there were many changes but by-and-by, the major things stayed the same. Atlantis still sunk, Hypolatia still encountered Tikki, and Joan of Arc still led France to victory against England.

_Anyway._

In _that_ timeline, Gotham was a fairly normal city with a pretty high crime rate but it didn’t have killer clowns, chemical incidents that drove people insane, or a rich man who dressed like a bat to put mentally ill patients back into a mental ward while he adopted every traumatized child he came across.

But that timeline is not this timeline.

In this timeline, a teen named Damian Wayne used to spend his free time moonlighting as a vigilante with his family.

Used to.

Because he could hardly continue to do that when nearly everyone was dead now, could he?

When the watchtower was blown up, it took out several Justice League members, including Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and Nightwing.

Damian and his family wasted no time looking into it - who did it, was it just an accident, why? How? Was it a targeted attack or a general one intent on reducing the power of the JL before enacting a nefarious plan?

They didn’t get an answer.

Star City fell and Jason, who had been visiting Roy, died - again. They managed to retrieve Cass but she was in a coma and they had no idea what she was doing in Star City in the first place. 

Bruce had been devastated and threw himself into the two cases on top of putting extra effort into fixing Gotham. He didn’t let Tim or Damian leave Gotham unless they had their respective kryptonian lovers with them to back them up.

(It didn’t help that with Red Hood out of the picture, Crime Alley doubled down on… well, crime.)

If asked, Damian would say that it was ridiculous and demeaning, he was fully capable of taking care of himself and he didn’t need his boyfriend to babysit him. But they played along ~~because he understood. He was mourning too.~~ Because it was a convenient excuse to go on dates with Jon and they needed to be on high alert anyway.

After Red Hood died, the bats stuck to Gotham and didn’t leave unless it had to do with a case - specifically the Watchtower case and the Fall of Star City’s case.

But when Superman went missing - two years after the watch tower fell - Batman went to look for him. He never came back but Damian and Tim found a bloodied piece of his cowl and an eye that they confirmed belonged to the Wayne Patriarch.

Damian ~~hesitated to~~ picked up the cowl.

Tim broke down.

Like their father, Tim threw himself into _the mission._ Only Kon and Alfred could talk him into taking a bit more care of himself. And, in extreme cases, it took Damian going in and knocking the only brother he had left out cold for his own good.

Damian, himself, carried on like usual, if a bit more aggressively. He’d stopped drawing when Dick had died, he’d stopped playing music when Jason passed, and he gave up pretending he didn’t care when his father died. ~~Talia came by to check in on him but she had to leave before the League picked up on her visit.~~

Tim died taking a bullet meant for Damian.

When Tim died, Damian gave up his right to have a family.

Batman alone again.

Jon moved into Wayne manor to keep an eye on him - because he was a suicide case, apparently, and shouldn’t be left alone.

Damian scoffed but he didn’t argue even when Lois came by every weekend to check in on them.

Another year passed and Superman was found…

With red kryptonite embedded in his chest with a device like some sick parody of the comic character named Ironman, and malicious red eyes. 

...He killed Jon.

Superman killed Jon. 

And Damian killed Superman.

After Jon died, Damian gave up the right to call himself someone who fought for Justice.

The battle had set Wayne manor up in flames, it would take five years to repair it. That didn’t matter to Damian.

He left the cowl and set up Cass’s body and Alfred in a new house in the next safest part of Gotham and made arrangements for them to be able to leave Gotham altogether if that was what they wanted.

After he set up the clean up for Jon and his father, he went to face Lois… to tell her what happened and await her verdict.

Damian had expected Lois to hate him. He had expected to see rage and sorrow, to allow her a moment if she asked for one, to see her break down or scream at him for taking her beloved family away-

He didn’t expect for her to pull him into a hug and comfort _him_ as if he hadn’t just killed her husband and told her that her son was dead because Damian had been too weak, too slow, too inadequate to save him. Then, while he was still off-kilter, she managed to talk him into staying the night. (She didn’t need protection, she just needed another presence in the too lonely, too empty house. If she did any of what he’d expected later, in the dead of the night and to no one in particular, neither one mentioned it.)

Damian set up shop in Metropolis - sort of. Metropolis wasn’t exactly Gotham. It didn’t have the same dangers and mugging rate, though that wasn’t to say they didn’t exist.

Damian didn’t patrol anymore, he only stopped crime he happened to come across and made sure the crime rate stayed down. He continued to guard Jon’s mother, it was the least he could do for the one who he’d given his heart. (As if it could make up for his sins against the Kent family.)

Eight months later, he was still in Metropolis and, last he heard from Gotham, Cass had woken up and taken up the cowl. She was doing a wonderful job as the new Batman and had, apparently, picked up a new Robin. Some meta kid named Duke.

She didn’t ask him to go back, so he didn’t. ~~He would if she asked, despite his renewed insecurities about whether he was qualified to fight for justice.~~

The choice proved to be a good one, both he and Lois needed someone else to heal. They stuck together, didn’t let the other go anywhere alone. ~~They weren’t doing very well but at least they weren’t getting worse.~~ Then Lois wrote an article that made someone put a hit on her for the fifth time since he’d moved in.

“You have got to stop doing things like this.” Damian muttered as he guided her away from walking into the sniper’s range.

“I’m a reporter, I’ve always done this. I think it’s because they know I have Clark’s protection anymore.” Lois replied wryly.

Damian swallowed his apologies, they would be unappreciated and this was not the time.

For the next week, Damian spent his time guiding Lois away from places she could get shot in and fighting the assassins invading their home.

“You need sleep,” Lois said, forcing him to lie down on the couch. 

Damian protested.

~~Mo~~ Lois rolled her eyes as she pat him on the head, he couldn’t help but lean into it. “I didn’t live with superheroes for more than two decades to be unable to protect myself for a couple of hours. I won’t leave the room either, promise.”

Considering she had stood up to Talia when his mother kidnapped ~~came to check up on~~ ~~him,~~ he didn’t doubt that.

Against his will, she drew him into a deep sleep. ~~_Mothers are a terrifying force of nature._ ~~

He jerked into consciousness at the sound of something shattering.

Damian snapped onto his feet and, in a split second, took in his surroundings.

Dark - electricity must have been cut. Lois, two intruders, one out cold with the remains of a vase scattered around him, the other had a bloody knife -

He lunged at the attacker and quickly downed them. It was quick work, Lois's attacker's defenses had been low, perhaps relishing the success of his attack after so many had tried and failed.

Damian knelt by Lois to check her injuries, a phone in hand already dialling the police to report the situation and ask for an ambulance.

"Lois? Lois, answer me." he demanded, putting pressure on the open knife wound. The intruder had severed an artery. ~~Amateur move, he should have gone for the one in the neck but Damian is grateful for the mistake. It means there is more time to save her.~~

She groaned. "Damian?" she mumbled.

"It's me, I'm here. You're going to be fine but you gotta stay awake."

“Ssorrry,” she slurred. “Couldn’t - I prmsed.”

“Save your strength. You can apologize later.” Damian looked her over again, it was too early for her to be so out of it. He had missed someth- the blade must have been poisoned. ~~Not as much as an amateur as he’d thought. Or were there more? Was the man he took down just following the orders and didn’t even know the knife was poisoned?~~

Damian cursed as he tried to look for the antidote on the man he had to have one he’d downed while keeping pressure on her wound. Just where was that damned ambulance?

“Dami-” Lois gasped, he felt her hand brush his shoulder, slack and falling away.

He turned, alarmed. _“Lois?!”_

Her eyes were glazed and empty, staring at nothing.

No.

“Lois?” he repeated, lifting one hand to check her pulse, ignoring the sticky smear of her blood against her skin that he left behind. 

~~_Nononono._ ~~

There was no reply, no pulse.

He swallowed harshly. “Mom?” He tried weakly, not even caring how lost, how broken he sounded. His vision blurred and there was something wet and hot trailing down his cheeks, but he barely noticed.

Damian pressed his forehead to hers, whispering his apologies for his inadequacy and ability to protect her. To protect anyone. He begged her to come back, even knowing it wasn’t likely or even possible. 

He couldn’t keep living if everyone he cared for was going to keep dropping like flies.

He paid no mind to the obvious steps of someone trying to sneak up and the click of a gun’s safety being removed.

What good was he if he couldn’t even protect one person? If he went back to Gotham, would Cass die too? Alfred? That new Robin that Cass picked up? ~~Was his love a curse that brought death? Is that why everyone was dying?~~

“Sorry kid, but I don’t keep witnesses.” he heard before a gunshot went off and the world went black.

Here’s the thing about Damian though. He’d died once before and was brought back to life through magic. 

No, not the chaos shard, that’s a different universe.

This specific form of resurrection magic originally resided in a magical bird - a phoenix, most would call it - that he had nursed to health and cared for years ago and that magic had passed into him when it resurrected him in place of itself.

That time, he had simply been brought back in his own body.

This time, fire ignited from his body and the Kent house went up in flames.

About 220 years pass, society goes into chaos and calms again.

Our story this time brings us from America to Japan, specifically Musutafu, Japan. Where a young child is born into a fairly traditional Japanese family.

This child was born with red and white hair that split down the center, as well as a pair of heterochromatic blue and brown eyes. But for a moment, the boy’s mother, Todoroki Rei, had thought they had turned green for a moment while she held him.

Shoto, the boy’s father had named him.

Young Torodoki Shoto, or as he knows himself, Damian Wayne, was - as Dick or Jon would say - freaking the fuck out.

**Author's Note:**

> Ao3 and Tumblr both took out my strikethroughs and I am not pleased. The end is a bit rushed, I might come back and change it.
> 
> I don't know if I will continue past Chapter 1 tbh. I need to catch up with BnHA before I can write anything past Overhaul. There's so much I want to say about this fic but at the same time, I can't think of anything to say.
> 
> I can't believe I killed Lois like that. I also can't believe killing Lois made me hurt more than Superman killing Jon, probably because I didn't go too much into Jon's death but still.
> 
> Also Damian was this close *goes to put index finger to thumb but misses thumb* to being reborn as Izuku but that would be in the maximum angst plot. No, we're going for maximum chaos route.
> 
> Also, should Marinette be Recovery girl's granddaughter or Yaomomo?


End file.
